Born in Jerusalem in about 1981, Ora Wise is the daughter of a Hebrew School teacher and a rabbi. She condemnsIsrael as a country replete with “illegal settlements on stolen [Palestinian] land”; “bulldozers crushing [Palestinian] homes”; “soldiers patrolling towns imprisoning [Palestinian] women and children in their homes”; “[Palestinian] men naked and blindfolded in the street;” “[Palestinian] children … shot in the head”; and “pregnant [Palestinian] women … detained at checkpoints.” Palestinian terrorism, Wise contends, is merely a reaction to Israel's horrific transgressions. She favors the creation of a single state, wherein an Arab majority and a Jewish minority would live side-by-side, as the preferred means of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While living in Jerusalem in the late 1990s, Wise worked with Rabbis for Human Rights, an organization whose members support the Palestinian militant cause and believe that Israel is guilty of widespread “human rights violations” and “land confiscation.”

At PSM's Third National Student Conference (held at OSU in November 2003), Wise openly called for “the destruction of” the “apartheid” state of Israel. She also declared that “Zionism is racism.”

After graduating from OSU in 2003, Wise settled in New York City where she became a member of Jews Against the Occupation, a group which contends that Jews “have no legitimate national identity and no entitlement to a nation state [i.e., Israel].” She also workedclosely with SUSTAIN (Stop US Tax-funded Aid to Israel Now) and Al-Awda, and taught Jewish Studies at a progressive Brooklyn synagogue. Moreover, Wise served for several years as a media spokespersonfor the national student divestment movement, which called for businesses and universities worldwide to terminate their financial dealings with Israel.

In the early 2000s, Wise co-foundedthe Palestine Education Project (PEP) -- later known as the Palestine/Israel Education Project -- “acollective of educators, activists, youth, and artists” that sponsored multi-media workshops in high schools and youth groups, to promote “understanding [about] common struggles against racism, militarism and displacement in Israel/Palestine, North America, and beyond.”

At PSM's Fourth National Student Conference (held at Duke University in 2004), Wise led a workshop promoting PEP's efforts to “brin[g] the Palestinian struggle to school.” In that session, Wise said it was vital for schoolteachers nationwide to tell their students that Israel represented a grave threat to the peoples of the Middle East. Further, she suggested specific classroom activities such as the following:

“Here is how you teach Israeli oppression. Give a kid some water, but give other kids a lot of water. Give some kids toys, and other kids no toys. Talk about the comparisons. Tell them the Israeli kids have the toys, the water. The Palestinians have nothing – and it is the fault of the Israelis.”

“Get children to draw photos of their families in their homes. Then, show them all the photos of what a Palestinian child would draw, reflecting oppression.” (“These special pictures,” she explained, could be ordered from various Palestinian activist sources which she named.)

“Get a hula hoop. Get the classroom of kids to stand close together around the hula hoop. Then put a child in the middle of the hula hoop. The child in the hula hoop is the Israeli. He has lots of space. He has all the water. Everyone else is crowded and uncomfortable.”

When a male student at the Duke PSM conference asked, in a public session, whether it was logical to expect that Jews would be treated respectfully in a majority-Palestinian state, Wise, from her seat in the audience, shouted him down and called him a “sexist.” “The land doesn't belong to them!” (Jews), she yelled.

Aside from her anti-Israel activism, Wise has also been an outspoken critic of free-market capitalism. In February 2002, for instance, she was among many demonstrators arrested for disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly during protests against the World Economic Forum (WEF) in New York City. Asserting that she was “very opposed to having groups of the global elite getting together and making decisions that affect the rest of the world’s lives,” Wise characterized the WEF as “basically the wealthiest of the world and government officials getting together to discuss their desires for profit, development and … exploitation of the world resources and communities.” Moreover, she lauded “massive mobilizations against corporate globalization and capitalism,” on behalf of “people who are marginalized, people of color, and poor people who don’t have the resources to endure the legal system.”

For details on other altercations Wise has had with law-enforcement officials, click here.

In the mid-2000s, Wise served as a speaker for the anti-war, anti-globalization, social-justice group Global Exchange.

Wise subsequently earned a master's degree in Jewish Education from the Davidson School of Jewish Education.Today she serves as director of the Children’s Learning Program at a progressive synagogue in Brooklyn called Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives. She is also the curriculum specialist for Detroit Future Media Workshops, a program that trains Detroit residents who are “interested in building [the city's] media economy through the creation of grassroots media, and community cultural production.” And she blogs for the website Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.